Side benefits

I’m reading Donald Gauss and Jerry Weinberg’s Exploring Requirements, and in the chapter called Measuring Satisfaction where they’re discussing the use of user satisfaction tests, they say this:

Even if the results are never summarized, the test is useful to those who fill it out. In fact, even if nobody fills it out, the process of creating the test itself will provide useful information to the designer. (p. 239)

Huh! Side benefits of creating a user satisfaction test.

Maybe this stuck out to me because I experienced something similar when I worked on the security enhancement project. On that project, to get a more accurate project time estimate, I attempted to map chunks of work to days on the calendar. Doing that did help significantly toward a better time estimate; but I think it also made me think about what the project involved in ways I hadn’t up to that point. It made me really focus on the big picture for a day or two, and I think the improvements from that may have benefited the project as much as the more accurate time estimate did.